Page 142 - Wisdom Unfurled

Purificatory Practices
The Master now directs His attention towards cleaning or purificatory practices which is a very unique aspect of PAM. We should note that none of the ancient schools, the Patanjali yoga in particular or the modern schools of yoga pay any attention at all to this most important aspect of spiritual sadhana, though all recognize the importance of purity and its maintenance in the spiritual way of life. The purpose of the cleansing practice is the purging of the mind and making it receptive to the efficacious influence of the Master’s grace.
We have seen earlier that samskaras are formed by the deliberate involvement of the heart and the brain in doing any action. Here it is to be noted that effects are produced even by mere thinking with passionate involvement as thoughts have life and have an effect on persons’ lives as stated by the Master. The origin of samskar formation has already been discussed in detail. If the person wants to attain liberation in his current life itself, he has to undergo bhog of all the samskaras he has created by himself for himself but normally a single life is not enough for this process as he goes on forming impressions even as the bhog process continues. The cleaning process devised in PAM aims mainly at the purging of the effects of impressions created in our day to day interactions so that need for their bhog in the future is obviated. In addition a good part of the impressions created already by our past actions can also be purged out by diligent and continuous practice of cleaning.
Tradition had advised that sravana and manana, hearing and contemplation of good things and satsangh with holy and pious persons would help to keep the mind pure. But in actual practice it becomes difficult as the minds of ordinary persons are already in a spoilt and impure state. There are three types of impurity, mala-superficial dirt, vikshepa-distortion of and distraction from the goal, a state of mind in which there are various thoughts which the sadhaka confuses with the goal and avaranas-coverings over the soul. The Master defines cleaning as using ‘the original power of thought in the form of human will for the refinement of the individual soul to enable it to ascend the steep and slippery path of Realization of the subtlest Essence of Identity’. We have formed the impressions with our own intentional consciousness through feelings of attraction, repulsion and ignorance of the underlying Reality. Hence we shall use our own will to remove the effects of solidity, complexities, darkness and grossness formed over our souls over thousands of births. But we are not really capable of doing this task all by ourselves and that is where we try to bring in the Divinity in some aspect or the other in the three methods of cleaning open to the aspirant in PAM. It must be clearly noted however that only one method is to be followed by the abhyasi, the one